by Charles Stross
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Product Description
Miriam Beckstein is a young, hip business journalist in Boston. But her very well-connected family comes from an alternate reality, where they are a little too much like the mafia for comfort. Having escaped to yet anther world, Miriam remains in hiding from both her Clan and their opponents. With a nasty shooting war going on in Gruinmarkt, the world of the Clan, Miriam is shielded from danger, but also from information. And there’s a secret yet for Miriam to discover; something that she's really going to hate--if she lives long enough to find out.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Driven by conflict, dragged down by too much mishegas, 2008-11-27
THE MERCHANTS' WAR begins in the aftermath of Prince Egon's bloody massacre of those attending his brother Creon's betrothal, including his father and brother and a number of Clan members. During the chaos, our heroine Miriam had been able to escape from Feudal World (the Gruinmarkt) to Absolutist World (New Britain), which is where she finds herself at the outset of this installment. Her ex-boyfriend Mike from Our World and his commando team had also been caught up in the bloodshed, and things go very wrong for them very quickly.
The remainder of the book--I hesitate to call it a novel, because it is not at all self-contained--is largely about the playing-out of the conflict between the three major forces in evidence at the beginning: Egon and his fellow nobles, Miriam's relatives in the Clan, and Mike's cohorts in the U.S. government. All of these players are frankly repulsive: the Clan are gangsters, not the merchants advertised in the title of the book and the series; Prince Egon is a murderous tyrant, and his retainers are more than happy to rape, pillage, and plunder; and the people running the U.S. government crack-down on the Clan are sleazy ends-justify-means folks who reserve the right to set off a nuclear weapon in Boston and blame it on terrorists (they don't; they just think it would be OK to do so if it would help them out). Nevertheless, it's difficult not to feel some sympathy for the Clan, besieged as it is in Feudal World, Our World, and even Absolutist World. Given their cool powers, we want their internal dissidents (like Miriam's mother Patricia) to triumph and the Clan become a force for good, or at least a force for well-behaved multi-universal merchant capitalism.
The most compelling thread in the book follows the clever maneuvering of Egon and his cohorts against the Clan, as he blunts their strengths (superior technology and mobility) and exploits their weaknesses (arrogance, reliance on outsiders). The second most compelling thread has to do with Clan efforts to "discover" new universes, based on a suggestion by Miriam. An important discovery is indeed made, but we will not know until the next book what its import truly is.
Although a good fraction of the book follows Miriam, who does quite a bit of running around, her main task is passive: get morning sickness and fail to realize what it portends. As in the previous books, much of the action occurs in the presence of secondary and tertiary characters, like DEA Agent Mike and Miriam's cousin Brillana, without any participation from primary characters. If you can keep this large cast of characters straight after waiting the year or so between books, more power to you; I still don't remember exactly who Olga and Brillana are and how their roles are different, and I don't have the patience to go back to the earlier books to find out.
As with earlier books, this one is packed with a good dose of filler. Particularly annoying are the meetings between cardboard bureaucrats who we care nothing about, having stereotyped conversations, and doing virtually nothing to advance the plot. There is also a lot of fooling-around--what Miriam's Jewish father might call "mishegas"--that allows Stross to make gratuitous, jokey pop culture references that would better have been left out.
In conclusion, Stross has created an interesting multi-verse, and he's still got plenty of surprises up his sleeve. If conflict is the driver of plot, he's got more than enough fuel for several more books. I will probably buy them, but I will also probably remain disappointed with amount of filler and frustrated with the too-large cast of characters. If you've read the first three books, you're going to want to read this one, and you may even find it better overall than the earlier books--I did--but that doesn't mean you'll be happy with it.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Relaxing Reading, 2008-10-27
Haven't quite figured out if I missed something not reading book III - I think I caught up quickly during this book. (Seeing your reviews on Book III I decided to skip buying it new.)
Remember - not all books are written to be literary masterpieces to be read and re-read until every last nuance of deep meaning has been rendered to great immortal thoughts to be endlessly analyzed in college papers..
Some books are just written for entertainment.
It is one of Stross' easier books to read - it still makes sense if you miss a word here or there. It's a good book to read if you want to relax, and at the same time have have some flights of the imagination as to what he wrote in Book V. It'll be fun seeing how he develops the new concepts he's sprinkled in at various points. Will it end up being a better written version of "Worlds of the Imperium" and gently slip into the whole genre of multiple worlds? Or is there some alien ueberintelligence where we are cattle?
And of course it'll be fun to see how The Pervert meets his just end...
Anyway - get the book. You'll have fun reading it, and you'll have fun re-reading it a few years later when the series is complete.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
When it's good, it's very very good. When it's not... it's okay., 2008-08-30
This series by Charles Stross alternately leaves me breathless for more, and at other points I'm ready to be distracted by almost any other book.
Let me start with the most irritating bit: the ending doesn't. The novel has no closure - it's just another chapter that leaves you on a cliffhanger. So if your attitude coming to The Merchants' War is "I might catch up with this series sometime, but I'm not in a big rush," it wouldn't hurt to wait for the next in the series. (I am annoyed by this. Give me SOME kind of ending, please.)
On the plus side, you note that I read it all the way through, and I obviously wanted to know what happened next. That's because Stross has created some pretty cool characters whose lives I want to watch. The protagonist isn't the coolest of them, though. Miriam might be the "main character," but it's because she's a catalyst and not cuz she's an inherently fascinating person. (Mike, on the other hand, is cool.)
The initial premise of the series is still golden: a very small set of people who, by gazing at a knotwork graphic, can transport themselves (and what they personally carry) to an alternate-history version of where they're standing right this second. Through the course of the books (and really, don't even imagine starting with this one) we've gotten to see how this ability has shaped "our" world and a few others.
Here, we have Miriam escaped from Certain Doom (that is, the last page of the previous book) and on the run. The viewpoint switches between various people whose lives she's directly or indirectly touched, and each of those people have their own goals and justifications. Some of these people's stories are more compelling than others, with irregular pacing that made me wish whole scenes had been cut ("Enough already!").
But at some point, Stross just got into the storytelling again... and I was happy to follow along.
Can you tell that I'm ambivalent about this book? I am. If you're completely in love with the series (and I can imagine how you might feel that way), go right ahead and buy it. I did like it; I just didn't love it. The Merchants' War isn't on my list of novels that I will press upon friends and strangers.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 dull, 2008-08-26
I really enjoyed the first book in this series, and the second as well, although not as much. By the third, it seemed to me that Mr. Stross had run out of ideas. The series seemed to be turning into "war" fantasy, full of battles and destruction. Many readers may enjoy this, but to me it's plain dull. I'd much prefer cleverness and intrigue to what seems to me to be plain old "shoot 'em up"s. If there is a book 5, I hope it gets back to more interesting world-building, sneakiness, and the like.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Fourth Book in the Series shares strengths and weaknesses of its predecessors, 2008-03-28
The Merchants War is the fourth book in Charles Stross series about a clan of world-walking drug dealers, and the book shares the strengths and the weaknesses of the previous volumes and ramps up the action and plot nicely.
Book Three, Clan Corporate ended with a marriage announcement and gathering that went horribly wrong as, simultaneously, agents from a US Government agency managed to make their way across to the world of the Gruinmarkt into the middle of a gathering set to marry the heroine, Miriam, to a brain-damaged son of the King, and said gathering went up in flames.
Book Four shows the smoke clearing from that event as Egon, elder son of the King, takes control of the situation and decides Something Must Be Done. At the same time, Miriam, barely escaped into the third world of New London, has new problems with the police forces in that world. And of course Mike, part of that op across to that world, has problems of his own.
What's more, not content with merely working out the consequences of these plots, Stross throws a new puzzle in the mix, and starts to answer a long standing question of the series: just what is the mechanism that allows the Family to really worldwalk in the first place.
Splendid, vivid writing, great plot and action and character bits make this another winner for Mr. Stross. I particularly liked Mike's view of Olga, a character we've seen before through Miriam, and now get new sides and facets as we see her through the eyes of Mike, and get a sense that she's even more competent that we really knew. The world and set up are just as intriguing as before, if not more so, with the revelations made in the book.
The major flaw in the book, and once again its not Stross' fault, really, is the marketing. The book, like a couple of the previous books, has an "ending problem". These books have been sliced and diced and released in a suboptimal way, in my opinion. The book simply ends without a real attempt at a crescendo.
Still, fans of the previous three novels will love this one, and if you haven't started reading this series--go get the Family Trade and get yourself started. World walking scions, battles in a medieval world with guns and an ultralight(!), intrigue, mystery, fine writing and character development. Its a tasty chili of goodness.
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